 Welcome, and thank you for joining us for today's TechSoup for Libraries webinar. My name is Crystal and I'll be your host. Today we are talking about Outside the Lines, a week-long international celebration of the creativity and innovation happening in libraries. Whether your organization is large or small, academic or public, you can participate by hosting at least one event or campaign that gets people thinking and talking about libraries in a different way. Libraries are dynamic centers for engagement that help everyone in your community be their best. To shift perceptions, let's not just tell people how libraries have changed, let's show them. Now in today's webinar we'll show you how you can use social media to help support your efforts with examples from our participants. Gain a deeper understanding of grassroots library marketing and inspiration for your next social media campaign. We have three guests joining us today, and I'll introduce them in just a moment. But before we begin, I have just a few announcements to share. We will be using the ReadyTalk platform for our meeting today. Please use the chat in the lower left corner to send questions and comments to the presenters. We will be tracking your questions throughout the webinar and will answer them at the designated Q&A at the end. All of your chat comments will only come to the presenters, but if you have comments or ideas to share, we will forward them back out with the entire group. You do not need to raise your hand to ask a question, simply type it into the chat box. Should you get disconnected during the webinar, you can reconnect using the same link in your confirmation email. You should be hearing the conference audio through your computer speakers, but if your audio connection is unclear, you can dial in using the phone number that we've shared in the chat. If you are having any technical issues, please send us a chat message and we'll try to assist you. This webinar is being recorded and it will be archived on the TechSoup website. If you are called away from the webinar or if you have connection issues, you can watch a full recording of this webinar later. You will receive an archive email within a few days that will include a link to the recording, the PowerPoint slides, and any additional links or resources shared during this session. If you are tweeting this webinar, please use the hashtag TS4LIBS. We have someone from TechSoup live tweeting this event so please join us in the conversation there. TechSoup Global is dedicated to serving the world's nonprofit organizations and libraries. TechSoup was founded in 1987 with a global network of partners. We connect libraries and nonprofits to technology, resources, and support so that you can operate at your full potential to more effectively deliver your programs and services and to better achieve your missions. TechSoup has helped to distribute over 14 million software and hardware donations to date through our product donation program. We offer software, hardware, and services available to public libraries and nonprofit organizations including products from Microsoft, Adobe, and Symantec. For more information about TechSoup product donations or services, please visit TechSoup.org and click on Get Products and Services. Now for today's webinar we are joined by three guests. Erica Grossman is a creative lead in the Innovations and Brand Strategy Department at Anything, the library district that serves Adams County, Colorado. Her role focuses on writing, editing, PR, and social media. Erica was part of the creative team that developed and launched Outside the Lines Libraries Reintroduced, a grassroots initiative designed to shift perceptions of libraries worldwide. She currently serves as chair of the Outside the Lines Planning Committee. Loone Axelson has over 15 years of experience in marketing with skills in graphic design, videography, and video editing. She has designed numerous social media, email, and text campaigns and puts her talents to use with the visionary team at Imagine If Libraries in Flathead County, Montana. And Megan Glidden also from Imagine If Libraries in Flathead County, Montana is the community engagement librarian. And she gets to explore and implement new and exciting ways to connect and engage with the community. My name is Crystal Schimpf and I'll be your host for today's webinar. Assisting us with chat, we have Susan Hope-Bard. And on Twitter we have Molly Bacon both joining us from the TechSoup team. And we'll have time again for Q&A at the end and we'll be tracking your questions throughout so please just share your questions in the chat as they arise. So we'd like to know a little bit about you and your experience coming in so we have a few polls for you. First of all, we'd like to know is this your first time learning about Outside the Lines? So is this your first webinar or any other type of engagement where you're learning about Outside the Lines as a program? And I'll give you just a few moments to respond to that. You'll want to click the button next to your response and then click Submit. And once you do that, you'll see the responses of everybody in the webinar who's already sent in their response. So I see the responses are rolling in. We're definitely seeing a majority about 3 fourths of our audience today is saying this is your first time learning about Outside the Lines. And so I just want to say welcome to you if this is your first experience. And about a quarter of you are saying that no, this is not your first time. You've learned about it previously whether that was a webinar earlier this year or maybe in one of our past years. And if so, I hope you get some new ideas today from our guests as they share what they've been working on. I'll close this poll in just a few seconds now. So if you're still putting in your response, I'll give you about three more seconds to put that in and two and one. And we'll close the poll here. All right, we've got a few responses right at the last second there. All right, now one more poll for you. Again, just getting to know you if you've joined us today. We would love to know if your library, whether or not you were involved, has your library participated in any of the previous years of Outside the Lines. So you can tell us again, yes, your library participated. No, your library did not participate. Or maybe you're not sure. And that would be something you would have to look into later on. So we just want to get a sense here again, select your response and then click Submit and you'll see everybody's responses there. And I see they're rolling in. I'll give you a few more seconds. We're definitely seeing a majority. Over half are saying your library did not participate in one of the previous years. So again, this is a new, that makes sense with our response to the previous session. A lot of you are learning about Outside the Lines for the first time. It looks like just over 10% are saying your library has participated in the past. So of course you're welcome to share. If you have any examples to share, you can put them in the chat and we'll try to share those back out throughout the webinar today. And if you're not sure, then that might just be something to check around with other staff in your library to see what's been done in the past. So we'll go ahead and close this poll in just a moment here and I'll do a little countdown for 3, 2, and 1. So that's great. Thank you for submitting your responses to these polls. So now that we've gotten to know you a little bit and we've introduced ourselves, it's time for me to hand things over to Erica who is going to get us started talking about Outside the Lines, Shifting Perceptions of Libraries. All right Erica, over to you. Erica, thanks so much. We are so glad to be here today and thanks for the opportunity for us to share more about Outside the Lines. Specifically, thank you to Crystal and TechSoup for hosting us. So before we get into using more details and information on social media, I'd like to give an introduction on Outside the Lines and why we even launched this initiative which I think is ideal considering what we just saw from the polling responses. It sounds like most of you are unfamiliar with this initiative. So a little backstory. Four years ago library directors from across Colorado met during an annual retreat and one of the leading topics of discussion during this retreat was shifting the perceptions of libraries. There was a real sense of urgency here that we can no longer wait to address this topic. We don't want to have to continue to answer the question of why libraries still exist or why libraries are still relevant when the Internet exists. So from that came the idea of doing something like a statewide marketing campaign, something to help bring awareness to libraries all across the state of Colorado. And the idea was to create something beautiful, something impactful, something bold. But as discussions evolved there was a realization that we could have the best campaign, the best, the prettiest, the shiniest campaign out there. But if the experience that an individual had walking into a library didn't match that campaign then the whole thing would just fall flat. So after some more consideration the group tasked with leading this project decided that perhaps it was time to rethink the tool. And the tool that we came up with was Outside the Lines. Outside the Lines is a week-long celebration demonstrating the creativity and innovation happening in libraries. This year it is September 10th through 16th, 2017. So be sure to mark your calendars. Libraries of all sizes and types, whether you are a small rural library or a large urban library or even an academic library, everyone is encouraged to participate. The inspiration is that together let's not just tell people how libraries have changed, let's show them. To do this, libraries sign up to participate and commit to doing at least one event or campaign that meets the following criteria. One, it gets people thinking and talking about libraries in a different way. So we really want to shift those perceptions that exist out there. We need to make sure that the image that comes to mind when someone thinks of their local library is one that's up-to-date and that's modern. Two, something that showcases the library out in the community as well as in the library. So this criteria is a really important one to us. We want to make sure that we are meeting people out in the community in the places where they live, work, play, or commute. We can't just sit around and expect people to walk through our doors unprompted. Something that highlights how your library is relevant to people's lives. Something that represents your local community. So thinking back to why it's important to have the experience of a campaign match, every community is different. So it's important for a participating library to really make sure that whatever it is that they're doing for Outside the Lines really works for them. Another criteria is something that's active versus passive, so something that gets folks engaged. We also want to make sure that it's something extraordinary and unexpected. And just a side note here, we say extraordinary, but remember this doesn't have to be a big flashy event. Sometimes the little things can have the biggest impact. And most importantly, something that's fun. Outside the Lines should never feel like a chore. You and your staff should feel excited about any event that you're doing, and share that enthusiasm and excitement with your community. So what you're seeing here is a map of last year's participating organizations which included 250 libraries from the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, England, Denmark, and Croatia. This year our goal is to have at least one organization from every U.S. state, as well as at least one participating library from each continent. And yes, that includes Antarctica, and we're actually getting close on that one, which is really exciting. As of today, we have 121 participating libraries from 36 states. We also have representation in Canada, France, Croatia, Italy, Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Australia. We're looking to grow this every day, and we're so excited about the global impact that we can have together. So what does Outside the Lines look like in action? I've got a few examples here of some of the different ways that libraries have participated in the past. What you're seeing right now, this is Virginia Tech University's library. Last year they hosted a variety of events targeted at their audience which are students on campus. So in addition to some really fun and innovative programs, they also set up several pop-up stations around their very large campus with the goal of surprising people and also gathering information. This included little mailboxes that have fun little takeaways in them. And they also had these whiteboards prompting people to share their thoughts. And there were a few different prompts that they had. This is just one of them that I wish I knew more about. And they would record these answers before wiping them clean every day. And I just thought this was such a fun way of gathering information about what their patrons actually want while also positing the library in a new and surprising light. These participants were also encouraged to share their findings using the getotl hashtag which you'll see up in the left-hand corner there. Here at Anything My Library we hosted a series of block parties to celebrate our community. At these block parties we brought the community together through food, music, games, dancing. We even had some football. Each block party was designed to represent the specific community served by our seven libraries. So we had seven different block parties. It was a lot in one week, but it was totally worth it. We held them in parks. We had them in a new housing development. That was a really great one because one of our goals last year was to reach folks who were new to our community. We live in a very rapidly growing county, one of the fastest in the country. And so we really wanted to reach these new folks who might not know about the library. So we went to a brand new housing development for one of those parties. And so for us this was really just a way to get out into the community and really get to better know who they are. And finally I wanted to just give one more example of Outside the Lines in Action. It has been just a little over a year since a gunman opened fire on the Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida. That horrific shooting left 49 people dead and left the city of Orlando reeling. The Orange County Library System, which is the system that serves Orlando, really stepped up in the wake of that tragedy to let the community know that the library is a safe space where everyone is welcome. So as part of their participation in Outside the Lines, Orange County decided to partner with Samflax, which is a local art supply store in the area. Samflax offered free art supplies to anyone in the community who wanted to create a piece of art in response to the Pulse shooting. As part of this partnership, Orange County offered to host a collection of created art and they had it travel across the district in order to just really help their community heal. Together the collaboration was known as Paint Strong Orlando and more than 500 people showed up for the opening reception. It was such a touching way to bring the community together. And I just really quickly wanted to quote Erin Sullivan. She's the public relations administrator for Orange County and she's also a member of our Outside the Lines planning community. And she wrote, part of the reason Paint Strong was such a success was that it was an organic project that had its roots in the community. The library simply invited it in so that it could thrive. That's something any library can do and you don't need a tragedy to find opportunity. There's a project in every community that needs a partner to help it take shape and the library can be that partner. So as you can tell, the possibilities of how you can participate in Outside the Lines are really endless, but there are some key reasons as to why participation in Outside the Lines can be really beneficial to your organization. First is shifting perceptions of libraries. Libraries everywhere face the same challenge, so why not face it together? Next is publicity. Outside the Lines provides a great framework for pitching your story to local media. And most of our participants do report having an increased media exposure directly as a result of their participation. Here at OTL HQ we also work very hard to share those library stories from across the globe with national and international media. And we've even seen some really great pickups recently including outlets like The Atlantic and The Epoch Times. OTL is also an opportunity to experiment and pilot new services. We like to encourage libraries to use OTL as sort of their petri dish to try out something new. It's really a great opportunity to just kind of get out of your comfort zone a little bit. Also establish new partnerships and meet organizational goals and objectives. So with that I would love to talk a little bit about social media. As a grassroots campaign social media has been an integral part to how we've seen OTL grow. We use the hashtag getotl across all of our social platforms and we encourage all of our participating libraries to do the same. We also invite libraries to consider using social media as a part of their campaign or their event. This can be a great way to reach a new audience and even create a more robust social presence for your library. There are a variety of factors to consider when you're incorporating social into your campaign. It's best to identify which platforms work best for your audience, specifically the audience you're trying to reach. But regardless of which one you choose we are here to help. We help support participants by providing them with social media graphics, prompts, and other templates that they can use to help promote their events. We tend to send that information out in July so we'll be having some new graphics this year, some new prompts, some new social media images, and we're really excited to get those out there and provide them to our participants. There are a variety of ways in which we've seen libraries use social media as part of their participation. For example, contests are a really popular approach and a great way to get new visitors to your social media accounts. Or maybe you want to provide real-time updates for your events. OTL is also really about library advocacy. So social media can be a great place to help prompt your customers to share their own library stories. We also love encouraging OTL participants to partner with other community organizations or businesses. And it's a great opportunity to forge those new relationships. And those relationships can also be a good way for you to have some cross-pollination across your social media accounts. And I'd like to share just a few examples now of some great OTL campaigns that specifically incorporated social media. This is the Florence Lauderdale Public Library in Alabama. And over the years, they've consistently incorporated social as part of their participation. In 2015, they hosted a historic scavenger hunt throughout the city. And by incorporating social media, they were able to provide hints and their patrons were able to share their own photos from the scavenger hunt. Just a really cool idea. So every year for Outside the Lions, Douglas County libraries here in Colorado host what they call the Great Douglas County Brew Tour. And for this, they partner with a variety of local breweries. And for those of you who might not be familiar with Colorado, we have a lot of them. So as part of this project, people pick up a brewery passport. They collect stamps at all of the breweries. And then they bring the passport back to the library for a commemorative pint glass. And in addition, the library hosts a variety of beer-related events and programs out in the community, things like naming contests and book and beer pairings, just a ton of really super fun events. But social media has always been a key part of that implementation. In one year, they launched a Facebook contest for the actual naming of a beer and collaborated with a local brewery to make sure that they were also really heavily involved on the social media side of this as well. It's really worthwhile when partnering with local businesses during Outside the Lions to ask them outright if they would be willing to make social media a part of their participation. It really helps us get the word out there. And so with that, we saw these partnerships in the social media really paid off for Douglas County. In 2015, for example, they saw 217 contest entries, which was a 189% increase from the year before. They had 21 Facebook posts. They had 82 comments, 312 clicks, 29 tweets, 13 mentions. And they reached so many people on Facebook, 26,000 on Twitter, 23,000. Really awesome measurable results that they were willing to share with us. And then of course, that's always coupled with those anecdotal results. These are the kind of results you see when you get out there in the community and you try something new. I love this quote from Haley at Douglas County about the real emotional impact of their campaign. She says, 220-something year-old young men ran into the library to get their pint glasses one day. They told their frontline staff that they hadn't been in the library since they were children, but that they might have to rethink that because they didn't know that we were so cool. I think that this quote really speaks to what Outside the Lines is really all about. It's about shifting perceptions of libraries in creative ways. In this case, Douglas County was able to reach a new audience that they hadn't realized how much the library had changed. But they engaged them outside in the community and they were able to get them back into the library as a result and change their preconceived notions of what a library really is. And like I mentioned before, Outside the Lines is a grassroots campaign. We really believe that we are all in this together and social media is a great way to showcase that. Libraries across the country or across the world might be doing things that are totally different or serving absolutely different communities, but when we all use that same hashtag, we're able to share our stories together, it really speaks to the power that this campaign can have. We are all facing the same challenges when it comes to changing perceptions of libraries. Let's face those challenges together. Use that hashtag. It really helps to connect us all. In addition, we're able to share that inspiration with everyone, including our networks and our national media, and show that libraries are really out there making a difference and that we're doing it together. And with that, I am going to pass things over to our friends at Imagine If Libraries. And they have been incredible OTL participants since we first launched this initiative. So I'm really excited to have them share their story. Great. Thanks so much, Erica. We're really glad to be here. Outside the Lines is something that's really exciting for us, and it's inspiring to see what other libraries have been up to. Imagine If Libraries really embraced the movement, and it really is something we focus on, hands-on interactive experiences for people of all ages all year long. And we've done everything from building chicken coops in the library, to putting on maker fairs, and where we focus on building 21st century skills. We're really serious about having fun and creating experiences for our communities. And I think our manifesto, which I have put up here, really goes a long way to prove that. I'm not going to read the whole thing, but if you get a chance to skim it. There are a few things I wanted to highlight here. I think you can see some of those things in bolds there, that our library is all about adventure and self-discovery. You can see that we're a launching pad for dreams. It's more than a warehouse for books and periodicals, but it's a place of community and a place of life. And I just wanted to bring this up because I think it really highlights what Imagine If is all about, and why we do what we do. So you can imagine that when we heard about outside the lines, we thought, yes, this is perfect for us. So in 2014 we jumped on the bandwagon or actually the Imagine If bike. Well, this is our director, Kim Crowley, testing out our Imagine If bike, which we use to put on pop-up programs all around the Flathead Valley where we're located. And I think the whole idea about changing the perception of libraries is something that we ran up against when we rebranded to become Imagine If libraries. We're a public library system in Northwest Montana, but we really wanted to show people that we are more than just books and movies, that we have all these great things to offer. So maybe you've heard of Imagine If libraries or maybe not, but like I said, we are a public library system. We're located in Northwest Montana near Glacier National Park. We rebranded in 2014. We serve a service area of about 5,000 square miles, and our population is about 99,000 people. And we have four locations in that area. So we are pretty rural. We're like a medium-sized library system. You can see on this next side, this is the Public Library Data Survey that came up with the average expenditure per capita which is about $44.73 in 2014. And that same year, our funding at Imagine If libraries was $19.30. So we are not a large, well-funded library system in a progressive university town. We're definitely an average-sized library system. We have a pretty conservative populace that we serve and our funding sucks. So I just brought this up to highlight that you don't need a lot of money to have creative programming. I do think the things that you need to have great programs and participate in things like Outside the Lines are planning and clear goals. You need to be willing to work with and for the community, and you have to be willing to take risks. So for us at Imagine If planning is really key. We have all those limitations. We don't have enough staff or enough money or enough space. We're always struggling with those. So we have to be really creative in what we do. We have a great strategic plan that we use. And we work hard on our overall community engagement structure so that we don't have to make decisions at every turn. We know kind of what the format is, and then we can be creative within that. So we have a creative team for brainstorming and a smaller group that actually preps programs. And we have people that have hours to do it, not all week. So we have a limited staff to help out with those things. We do have a criteria for success and it's actually very similar to that of Outside the Lines. And we're in the process of developing a community engagement action brief to guide what we do for adults. And so this is a bit of a preview, but it will read something like, convince busy adults who think that they have no time to learn or play, that by taking a few moments to be joyful, learn a new skill, and make connections, they will discover that they are lifelong learners which leads them to seek out new experiences with curiosity and self-confidence which will create engaged citizens who build a thriving community. And I wanted to share that because I think you can see that it has some things that are similar to those Outside the Lines criteria. And I think all the programs we do here really get people thinking about a library in new ways. It's about being hands-on, so again that active, engaging, unexpected, delight. And it's all about the community. That's like the big end goal here is a thriving community. And so we use these tools all year long and it's been really successful for us. We've seen over the course of about three years we've seen our programing numbers double and people's attitudes and expectations have changed. People are much more receptive and willing to try new things. And in some ways it's hard to keep up with the unexpected because people are starting to expect the unexpected. They are always looking for something new and exciting to happen from either at the library and imagine if we are out in the community. And we start to get people who come to us and they want to partner for things. And I think those are some of the things that we're all going for in our libraries whether we've participated in Outside the Lines or not. And so now I'll get into some of the examples that we have done for Outside the Lines. And each of these have involved planning and collaboration, have a community focus, and risk taking all in various degrees. In 2015 we did a program called Portraits of the Flathead. And this one we worked with a local photographer to develop. We had the idea and we went and talked with him and developed a plan and we figured out how to take photographs of all these great community members. We took pictures of babies and bike mechanics. And here you can see two of our favorites, Mr. Bradshaw on the left there who comes into the library every day, takes off his shoes, puts on his slippers and then comes and asks for the latest books on world politics. We all actually think he may have been a spy. And then Molly Pretty on the right there is a local reporter and has like 45,000 followers on Twitter. And so these are awesome people in the community. And I think this one was such a success. We had openings in all of our locations and invited the community to come see the photos. We also put postcards with the photos out around the community and hung up posters with the photos. And I think this really struck a chord because it was so representative of the community. And I think thinking back to those criteria, I think it really nailed that one, that it was all about the community and really represented people and showed the community in a new light. So that was really great. And then in 2016 we did a seed workshop. And you can see on the left people in action cleaning seeds. And this was something we did in the build-up to our Flathead Growth Seed Library which we launched in March of 2017. And this was a great big project for us. It took a lot of time planning and organizing. We had a lot of partners. We were working with Good Seed Company and the Columbia Falls Junior High and a food corvind here. All of these partners have really made it a success and made it possible. This workshop and seed library are part of a pilot project. So Erica mentioned that before, that it's a good time to try something out and see if it is going to be worth your while. And this was the seed library was something we've been wanting to do for a while. And have looked at it and looked at it and just weren't sure we would get the numbers for the actual effort that we knew would go into making it. But we decided to go for it. And we are in the process of evaluating it right now. But I think what we're seeing, the response to them so great, the numbers of people attending workshops is good and the actual use of people taking seeds and growing them and coming back and donating seeds is already way better than we expected. So I think it's because it's so relevant to people's lives. And so we're calling it a success and we're really excited that our risk is paying off and we're already kind of brainstorming about how we can carry this out in our other locations. This is just in our Columbia Falls location right now. So we did this big project, big workshop, and working on the Flat Grows Seed Library. And then that same year we did something a little bit less involved. We did a program called Listen In where we put out what we called listening chairs. So we had just these chairs you get at the hardware store and a box with a journal and a prompt asking people to take a moment out of their day and just listen and reflect. And so we had it out for the whole week of Outside the Lines. The chairs were unattended. So we just had a chair and the box with the journal in it. And it was pretty minimal effort, low cost, and low risk. Maybe someone would take the chair. It was kind of the worst thing that could happen. But I just wanted to share one entry that we found in the journal because I think it speaks volumes about how this was worth it. Went right by this chair. Don't know how many times. Figured somebody left it. Just now notice the box. Guess I need to relax more. I feel, smell, see, fall. Love, love, love this park, Montana, everything in my life. I feel single and in my late 30s having problems getting a decent job. But when I came here, hear children laughing, hear the river, see all the beauty, say hi to such friendly, wonderful people. I know how blessed I am and everything is going to turn out amazing. Thank you for the chair. What a truly special idea. It feels like a great hug. Thank you to those that created this and keep up this amazing place. And so I think we got maybe 10 to 20 entries in each journal. And so it wasn't huge numbers that we got to mark down on our statistics sheet for that month. But I think that quote really speaks to how great the impact is that you can have. You know, this person took a moment to reflect, really found some appreciation for where they were in life. And I think that's a success for us, totally worth it. And we had one more program that we did in 2016 which was we called Still Screaming. In July on the left there you can see we asked for help from people to decide what should be our imagine if ice cream flavor. So we took out two ice cream flavors custom made for us by our local creamery called Sweet Peaks. And we asked people to sample both flavors of ice cream and then vote by taking a pin. And then so in September or outside the lines we were announcing our winner. And we did that by loading up our imagine if bike with a bunch of honey, raspberry, goat cheese flavored ice cream and giving it away for free. And this was definitely a little bit more expensive and a little bit more risky. What if people didn't want to eat goat cheese ice cream? Or what if all the ice cream melted? But we found out that people were so receptive. They had this moment of delight, unexpected from the library. I got a lot of, are you giving out ice, or what are you doing? We're giving out ice cream. Free ice cream from the library? Wow, you guys are so cool. So for us it was a great success and really fun and exciting. And so I just wanted to offer a bit of advice for libraries out there especially if you have not participated in Outside the Lines. I think it is such a wonderful thing to do. I think you should make a plan, sign some partners, and start small. It doesn't have to be anything big. When we did our listening chairs, basically our partners, we just asked the city if we could put the chair in the park. And they said, sure, that's fine. And it still had a good impact on someone's life. And I think that's good to remember is that it doesn't have to be this great big thing. And it doesn't have to be something totally crazy. It can be something small like putting up a chalkboard and a prompt. So try something new. I think like Erica said, Outside the Lines is the perfect time to go for it and to stand up and say that not only are we still relevant, but libraries are rocking it. And so I think that's kind of how we see things here at Imagineous. And I'm going to turn it over to Lune and she's going to tell you a little bit more about how we promote on social media all these programs. Thanks, Megan, and hello everyone. So Megan filled you in on why and how we do things at Imagineous, and that we design experiences pretty much all year round. I'm going to show you how we use social media to not only increase awareness and attendance of our events and activities, but also in keeping in line with Outside the Lines, I'm going to show you how to shift the public's perception of the library as well using social media. Just like everything else we do at the library, using social media cannot be haphazard. There must be a plan. The person that oversees it needs to be invested and have an understanding of the library and know the library's voice. That's really important. And the other part is to be committed to carrying out the strategy. You can't just have to do it. If you take on some social media, you need to be committed and otherwise it will die. It won't work. You really need to understand the purpose behind every move you make and set goals. So here's some of the goals we have here at Imagineous. Ultimately a big part of using social media is to change the way people think about the library just like with Outside the Lines. I'll get into some examples of how we're doing this in just a minute. Of course I want to talk about another big step in dividing social media, but another big step is defining a social media strategy. And that is knowing which social media platforms are best suited for your goals. There are hundreds of social media as we know out there. So make sure you have clear goals defined before you set out to match those goals with the best delivery method. With social media it's not about quantity, it's about quality. So whatever you choose make sure you can commit to it like I said earlier and do it well or just don't do it at all. Currently Imagineous uses Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. We'll be launching Twitter soon and a Wordpress blog shortly thereafter. It's worth noting that the decision to launch Twitter and a blog came nearly after a year after I was brought on as the Marketing and Communications Coordinator for Imagineous. So for smaller libraries sticking to just two or three social media platforms might be the most effective way to accomplish your goals right now. And later on you can always add more. Our focus today will be on Facebook and Instagram as the primary social media tools that we have in our arsenal right now that we use at Imagineous Facebook. Well it's such a great way to connect with local community and other organizations. And it's a fantastic way to keep in touch with other libraries and what they're doing. And as you may know there's almost 2 billion active users worldwide right now. So it's kind of the big one. I recommend making a list of businesses and organizations that you've built relationships with or that you want to build relationships with and make a habit of sharing your posts and events with them. The thing that's great about social media and especially Facebook is the opportunity for two-way conversation. You can not only send messages but receive them and get valuable feedback on areas you can improve. And with Facebook ads you can reach your target audiences with a very limited budget. So if you're not already boosting your posts I highly recommend it. Even a small amount like $10 can significantly increase engagement and reach the target audiences that you have set aside hopefully. Plus Facebook is integrated with Instagram now. And you can easily keep track of posts and comments and create Instagram ads all in the same dashboard. Keep in mind that when you post an ad to Instagram using this dashboard Facebook posts don't always translate over to Instagram seamlessly. So you may have to modify the content to accommodate for that in the Facebook ads manager. Just keep that in mind that the language that you use and the voice that you use may be different across different platforms. So you might have to modify that. Now I'm going to show you some examples of how I learned to increase Facebook and Instagram engagement while I've been at the library. I was hired in August of 2016 as the Marketing and Communications Coordinator for ImagineIt and I only had retail marketing experience prior to this. So Outside the Lines was my first social media campaign. I actively promoted for the library and it was really fun. I was really excited to start kick off with that. So here's one of the posts we did for Outside the Lines that Megan mentioned, our listening chairs. What a great project. As you can see we kept it simple. We used clear, easy to read text and a nice photo. We had a fair amount of engagement without even boosting this post. Imagine how many people could have been reached if we had put like $5 on it. Basically if you want to be seen out there in Facebook land you're going to have to pay for it. You don't always have to do this but on your more important posts I really recommend it. You don't have to have a large budget but it's worth it and very cost effective especially when compared to traditional advertising. So as long as you know your audience Facebook's targeting tools are pretty awesome so take advantage of that. You will reach your audience that way. Here's the same post on Instagram. Instagram is an image based platform and it's all about beautiful photos. It's another great way to connect with local community and organizations as well as building online community and it's a great way to share ideas and draw inspiration from other users. But you have to be active on Instagram just like Facebook. You have to be active to get results meaning you need to be looking for accounts with similar interests and follow them. Make sure to reach that you're searching relevant hashtags to see what others are doing and that's a great way to find new accounts and follow them. And doing this you'll find that other users will follow you back. So in this post I want you to pay attention to how I used hashtags back then and later I'll show you how I learned to use them. Here we only received 16 likes and one comment. With a greater understanding of how Instagram works you can make it a more effective tool to reach your audience and I'll touch on this in a few minutes. So here's what we did for Outside the Lines. Here's another example of a post we did using the Carousel feature on Facebook where you can add more than one photo to the ad. It's a pretty cool and creative way of doing something differently and showing what you're doing differently at the library. As you can see we boosted this post for about $8 and received almost double the engagement as the prior post reaching 917 people and getting 27 likes compared to reaching only 635 people and 14 likes without boosting. The Carousel feature is an example of how creative you can get with Facebook and show how you're doing things differently like I said earlier with a limited budget. You won't always have to have, I mean you won't always get huge levels of engagement on every post to keep in line with the goals you've set especially for smaller libraries but as long as you're sticking to your strategy, evaluating your results and experimenting with what works you will see growth. So don't be afraid to play around. It's actually a big part of being successful with social media. And as, oh here's how the Carousel works. And as Megan mentioned partnerships are a huge advantage when getting your message out to the community. This is especially true on Facebook. Here we partnered with a good seed company to create a successful seed library, something that would not normally be associated with a public library like Megan had mentioned this earlier. So what are you doing differently and how can you showcase that on social media? We take the good seed company here which gives them a notification and in turn they share this post with their audience. Tagging other partners is an effective way to network on Facebook and Instagram so do take advantage. This is also a great example of how boosting a post along with using the right targeting tools can cause a huge jump in engagement. Just compare the numbers on this post to the last. We went from 917 people reached and 27 likes to over 2,200 people reached. 52 likes and a whopping 15 shares. Total engagement by the way is more than just about likes. It's about how many people are talking about your content, how many people are actually getting in there and sharing and getting engaged. So that's something to keep in mind. Here is the same post on Instagram. Take a look where I placed the hashtags this time. It's in the first comment so they are not seeing where people, when people scroll down they hide. So this little trick is useful because no one really wants to see like 20 hashtags when they are reading your caption. So it's important to use these little tricks to get better results. Also using relevant hashtags gets more views. So that's the whole purpose behind them and potentially more followers. And imagine if we now have a list of relevant hashtags for different themes that we use and we update that list frequently. I recommend doing that as well and play around with them because it takes time to find what works and what doesn't. I just really recommend getting in there and getting your hands dirty. Networking on Instagram pays off too. In this Instagram post we positioned ourselves with a local celebrity, Bark Ranger Gracie from Glacier National Park. They have a huge following on Facebook and everybody loves this dog. And we had the opportunity to take a photo up with this dog so we jumped on it and received better engagement all around because of it. So get in the habit of looking for opportunities to tell your library's story wherever you may be and in interesting new ways. You kind of just have to think about it all the time. Lastly, I want to talk to you about how Facebook and Instagram make it easy to use video to reach your audience. Here we saw a ton of engagement on Facebook Live. We made a video at a mini maker fair. We organized with other partners. I think Megan had mentioned this in the beginning. Well there's this giant trike by a local maker named Merle with his name. He made this thing and actually you could sit up, you can see a little guy up there sitting in there. It actually drives. I mean you couldn't drive it there but it was just this amazing piece of work. And just by doing this video it created like a whole bunch of engagement that we had no idea it was going to happen. And it wasn't even boosted. There was nothing fancy about the video. It was just to the point and very simple caption as you see. The post reached nearly 14,000 people including video views, reactions, comments, shares, and post clicks, all that combined. What I'm getting at basically is that you don't have to be a professional videographer to make engaging videos that will tell your library story. If you keep it simple and see what happens and experiment, you'll find out what works and what doesn't. Social media is all about getting your hands dirty like I said earlier. Get in there and try things out. I can't say that enough. And we've done that at ImagineF. You can do the same thing using Instagram Stories like we did here to announce the activity going on at our Play Expo a couple of weeks ago. This year's Play Expo was our highest attended. And getting the word out couldn't have been easier than using the tools available in Facebook and Instagram. And these are all just a few examples to get you started using social media to reach your community and begin telling your story in ways that make people think differently about libraries. This is what it's all about. So remember, with clear goals, the right platform, and an understanding of how to use them, you can set the stage for social media success not only during campaigns like Outside the Lines, but in every post you make. So that's what I have for ImagineF. Thanks. I'm going to turn it back over. All right, Lune, thank you. And thanks also to Megan and Erica working their way backwards for this presentation on Outside the Lines and how you've used it in your library. And some great examples here. And we have gotten some excellent questions and we'll get to those in just a minute. I wanted to first just put out a reminder that we are recording this and it will be archived and you will automatically receive that archive as soon as it's available in your email. And we'll also include the slides and some of the links that have been shared so far. So that will come to you in your email within a couple of days. And then we've also been putting some answers out in the chat, but we have a few questions that have come in. We want to address here verbally as well. And Lune, the first question I have is actually going to be for you. So looking at some of the social media practices you've shared, you talked about choosing pictures and having kind of a very specific way of choosing which pictures you wanted to put out there. And Marquita asks, do you have a specific criteria for choosing the focus picture or video for your posts? I was thinking of creating some guidelines so that we are using more eye-catching photos. Our posts are often all over the places. There are multiple people posting. So do you have any tips there? Sure, that's a good question. It is a great idea to come up with some guidelines as far as you could talk about framing a shot. It's really important. And then especially with platforms like Instagram, you're kind of telling a story even just on your page. I recommend studying what other people are doing and really studying what a good photo is. Instagram is about beautiful photos. So if you go and look at other Instagramers, and you can see there's a color story sometimes. It just works together. So you really do need to think about what are you trying to tell? What story are you trying to tell before you take a picture? Make sure the background is clean. Just the basics of photography, make sure your shot is framed at a very minimum. You're going to want to take a lot of photos. We take literally thousands of photos here and we don't use nearly all of those. But it is a good idea to think about framing your shot. What is the purpose? What are you doing? Don't just go aimlessly out there taking random shots and try to make it beautiful. Those are just some guidelines that I go by just off the top of my head here. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. And now Megan, I'm going to go back to your section and ask a question here. Of course you shared some of the programmatic types of examples of things you're doing to get out in the community. And one of those was about those photos, the portraits of people in your community. And Heather asked, I would like to know more about that, not quite understanding the why. Love the photographers, the community, the library, etc. But what was the full concept behind that? Could you share a bit more? Sure. And I think that's a great question because basically the whole concept was to celebrate the community. And so a lot of times we have this overarching structure that allows us to do something like that, not because it's related to a book or something like that, or it's necessarily teaching a skill, although a lot of the things we do are related to books and a lot of things we do are related to teaching people skills. But it was just to celebrate the community and help people look at each other in a new light. I think the way we did it, it was very egalitarian because everybody was framed and shot the same way. And we had people from all walks of life and all different backgrounds. And to see everybody given that same treatment, I think really spoke well and helped people kind of change their perception of other people in the community. So I think that was our overall goal was just to celebrate the community. Excellent. Thank you. And I have time for just one more question live here on air. If we don't get to your question now, I just want you to know we'll follow up with you via email later on. So we will get to your questions. We've had quite a few come in especially here at the end. But we have time for just one more now and then a few announcements. And I'll ask you to stay on the line because we've got a survey for you at the end just asking what you thought of today's webinar. So I hope you'll stay on the line for that. But last question, Erica, I would like to just ask you, we've gotten a lot of questions about people saying how do you do this in this type of library or in this type of setting? And I know there are a lot of examples out there from the three years of the program so far. So do you have any recommendations for other places to look for examples of what people have done and where to turn for that? I do. So first of all, I would like to just say if you have any questions at all and are looking for more examples, feel free to reach out to me directly at info at getoutsidesalines.org. I'm more than happy to work with you one-on-one. But one of the things that I like to recommend when you're starting this brainstorming process and you're looking for ideas, I know there are a lot of folks asking about how school libraries participate. And we have tons of ideas on that. But what I would suggest to everybody is to really focus on your audience and let the audience sort of dictate what you would do. So if you're a school library, are you focusing, is your audience students? Is your audience other faculty? Or is your audience the community? If it's students, if that's who you're trying to reach, then design something based around where your students hang out. Maybe that's a football game. Maybe that's somewhere on campus, depending on what type of school you are. I know that's something that we've learned along the way each year is that when we really define our audience, we're able to create something that's far more effective. And I think I had mentioned this in the presentation, but as an example last year, we decided instead of trying to focus on everybody in the community, we decided to focus on new residents because our community is rapidly growing. We're one of the fastest growing counties in the country. And so we really wanted to target those new folks in the area. So we went to places where there are new people moving in, new housing developments, things like that. So I think when you're looking for an example, I'm happy to share more with you. You can find them on our social media pages including Facebook. We also have a Storify account that you can look at for more examples. And if you just want to shoot me an email, I'm happy to point you in the right direction. All right, great. Erica, maybe if you'll just type your email in the chat before we sign off, people can grab that as we're wrapping up here. And thanks again to all three of you for your presentation. I mean there's just so many excellent ideas here, and you shared some very concrete ideas for how to actually accomplish the social media as well as the programming side of things. So that's excellent. Just a couple of very brief announcements before we sign off. Of course, TechSoup for Libraries and TechSoup, we've got webinars happening all the time, and we hear our two coming up. The first one is actually very focused on libraries working with workforce and business initiatives and lifelong learning. So that will be on Tuesday, July 11th. And you can learn more on our webinar page for more information on that webinar. And another one on using technology for social change on July 20th. Also, you can learn more about what libraries are doing on TechSoup for Libraries. We've got a blog and a newsletter there. And also we list our upcoming webinars events there as well. So that's TechSoupforLibraries.org. And then the last thing is I just want to thank our webinar Spencer ReadyTalk for sponsoring today's webinar. And thanks to all of you for joining us. Stay on the line. We've got a post-event survey coming up that you can take. But I appreciate you being here, and hope you have a wonderful day. Thank you. Bye-bye.